Congress, Politics, and Tort Litigation

Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal -- Tort Tribute, by Kimberley Strassel.  Here's an excerpt:

Using hearing and subpoena power to aid the trial bar is an old play, and was common when Democrats were last in control. Remember the 1998 Big Tobacco settlement, one of the biggest paydays in trial-lawyer history? The groundwork was initially laid in Congress with Mr. Waxman's 1994 hearings, in which he lined up tobacco executives to accuse them of adding nicotine to their products and of lying in their testimony. These fishing expeditions helped to publicly vilify the industry, softening it up for a later legal collapse.

When Democrats lost power in 1994, the "investigatory" role passed to liberal state attorneys general such as New York's Eliot Spitzer, who used their own power to embarrass companies and leak details that helped their trial-lawyer friends. Which industries will receive the most congressional summonses in the next 18 months? The very same the trial bar has been trying hardest to crack in recent years: MTBE manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, oil giants. Bet on it.

Meanwhile, as companies are dragged in to explain past actions, Democrats will be working on their second strategy: ensuring industries' future actions are also more open to lawsuits. This will come in the form of small, seemingly innocuous additions or subtractions to legislation -- what might best be termed "trial lawyer earmarks." For a sense of how these work, consider the current $120-plus billion Iraq war supplemental, which includes a section about chemical security.

BGS